The new business, which we’ve dubbed “Ivy Rowe Furniture” provides high-end, customized sorority and dorm-room furniture with built-in storage and workspaces. We currently have a slate of business with a national sorority chapter, and plan to expand to include dorm-room furniture for colleges and prep schools. The idea is to provide durable, stylish, customizable furniture that makes the best use of a small space, and provides multiple configuration options for the students.

How did you come up with this idea?

Two years ago I was commissioned by Kim Norton-O’Brien, an interior designer based in Rhode Island to build four custom walnut chairs for a kitchen she was redecorating. She was apparently impressed enough with the work I had done for her that she contacted me to discuss a large project that she had taken on. Kim is a member of Alpha Phi Sorority, and has been very active nationally since she graduated. Kim had been working to redecorate an Alpha Phi house in Massachusetts, and based on her success was given the mandate to fully redecorate six properties across the country. The furniture she was initially interested in had come from a local custom furniture shop, which wound up being very expensive and was difficult to deal with. Knowing that this small shop couldn’t handle the volume that was coming up, Kim asked for my help in finding a manufacturer that would work with her to build the bedroom furniture for the new houses, and could handle large, repeat orders in the future. I mentioned the idea to Dale Gardner, a friend from the woodshop, and we discussed potential ways to source the furniture for this project. Dale has over 30 years of woodworking experience, and I knew that he would be a great partner for this new venture. Together we contacted a number of manufacturers that we thought could handle the project, worked out the design details with Kim, and found the right place to produce her furniture. We had prototypes made, which we flew out to inspect and finalize, and settled on a final manufacturer. Our first order was installed in the Alpha Phi House at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts in August.

Which part do you play in the value chain?

We work with the client to customize and finalize the order for the individual houses, based on floor plans, and then liaise with the manufacturer to coordinate fabrication of the furniture. The furniture is shipped to the installation site in assembled units, which we then install and connect. We have designed our furniture in such a way that a selection of standard desks, dressers, beds and shelves combine and connect to form multiple rooming options for our clients.

Now to the interesting part: who makes the furniture?

The manufacturer that we partnered with is called Crescent City Cabinets, and they are based in New Orleans, LA. They are cabinet makers by trade, but also do a lot of furniture fabrication and have the capacity to expand their operation as we grow. What we were really looking for was a shop with a CNC (computer numerical control) machine, which allows you to control all of the cutting via computer. We wanted our furniture to be consistent and easily replicated, but not mass-produced in a factory. The CNC machine allows a smaller shop to operate like a larger factory. CAD drawings of our products are loaded into the machine, and the material to be cut is loaded into the CNC. It cuts out exactly the pieces that are required to make a given piece of furniture, which are then assembled and finished by hand. This means less wasted materials (the computer optimizes materials usage) and more efficient production, while still allowing skilled cabinetmakers to do the final assembly of the product.

What alternatives did you consider before choosing this shop?

There was always the option to go overseas, but we felt strongly that we wanted to keep this company in the US. We wanted to have better control over the quality, wanted to keep the turnaround times down, and of course also wanted to support the furniture industry within the United States. Our product is extremely well-built, durable, and high-end, which is why we partnered with veteran domestic cabinetmakers to handle the fabrication. We spoke with multiple small manufacturers on the East Coast, Midwest, and South…because not only did we need the furniture to be of high-quality, but we needed to be within the price ranges dictated by our institutional clients. The New Orleans shop was the clear winner for not only quality and price, but also proximity to a lot of the jobs that we have lined up, which saves on shipping costs.

Why this one?

Well, there are obvious economic reasons for choosing any manufacturer over another. Some of them simply couldn’t hit our numbers, so they were off the table. The shop in New Orleans was actually a referral from a larger international manufacturer with whom I had done business in the past for Broken Line Design, so we at least had a positive reference from the beginning. We were impressed with their responsiveness, the fact that they knew exactly what we were looking for, and their scalability. We also liked their story. Crescent City Cabinets occupies a warehouse space that was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, and is located in an area that still has not been rebuilt following the devastation that occurred there. It’s a shop that is run by lifetime locals to the area, and we liked the fact that we could help keep a small business such as theirs going for years to come if everything worked out. It is unfortunate that the fact that their economy still has not recovered from Katrina is one of the very reasons that they were able to meet our price targets (their costs are very low) but at least we can feel good about not only keeping their shop in business, but potentially allowing them to expand it in the future as we grow. Right now their current setup is sufficient to handle the volume we are giving them, but as we expand we anticipate the need for them to grow with us. There are lots of empty warehouses surrounding their shop, so perhaps one day we’ll see them being used again.

What does the future look like for your business and theirs?

As I’ve said, we see a huge market out there for non-traditional, higher-end furniture for college students, and we hope to continue to grow and expand. We also plan to have our manufacturer grow along with us, which would just be great for everyone. Plus, one can always use an excuse to take a trip to New Orleans!

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So you can see why we thought it was worth returning to Drew’s continuing story. No one coerced or incentivized him to choose this shop in New Orleans. It could have been anywhere, and of course people in every community need jobs. But in this case the little extra social value made the difference for Drew—helping out a devastated neighborhood that is still trying to recover, seven years after a disaster made by mother nature and weak levees. The economics were better than the competitors, but so was the social benefit—success and social value all mixed together. Every day these little differences of degree pass by our radar screens. Altruism and self-sacrifice to secure a social value for someone else is a great thing, and we could all stand to do at least a little of it each day. But all the more, doesn’t it make sense to take every opportunity to go for the little social values that don’t even require a sacrifice? To find them, we expect you have only to look.